Amballore House Read online

  Thoma’s latent hatred toward church and its rituals intensified after this disheartening episode of his daughter’s life.

  He had a habit of coming up with some reason, sensible or senseless, to blame the church priests who used to walk along the road in front of his home. His common complaints were that they were not fighting for the common man’s cause and not representing the downtrodden in front of God. Eventually, he started blaming them for every piece of bad news that he heard on All India Radio. Naturally, he blamed them for Rita not having children. He started shouting at them, prompting them to walk fast or sprint uncontrollably when they walked close to his home.

  “Listen, you sinners! You may run away from me, but remember, you have to answer to your own God for the bad things you do,” Thoma screamed at them whenever they took to heels while approaching his rental home.

  He concluded his verbal abuse with a spontaneous overflow of powerful spit, reminding the priests of Wordsworth’s immortal definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” The spit emanated from him in long streams, as a second act to his vitriolic comments. His repressed emotions surfaced as agitated froth that would miraculously transform into speedy spit jets. The whole scene had the magical quality of poetry according to the customers of the nearby toddy shop.

  The toddy shop was located two houses away from Thoma’s rental house and it was his second home, a home away from home. He spent most of his time in the shop, especially on the days he did not work. The shop’s patrons were his best buddies.

  His spit rained on his adversaries — in this case, priests — like the manna that descended upon the Israelites in the Old Testament. The spit fountain marked a triumphant assertiveness of his words conveyed to his adversaries. It was his partner in crime, an accomplice to his words, and became a second nature to his existence. Bhavani, the neighboring barber’s wife, claimed that his spit was worse than his words, rephrasing the expression “barking is worse than biting.” With assistance from a moderately powerful wind, his spit could reach the target, giving him a shower of his lifetime, a shower in its whole untold glory.

  The unlucky target of the spittle was not confined to the ministers of the church. His manna rained upon the Mannuthy government school teachers as well. He screamed at those teachers who happened to pass by his home in the morning just before school commenced. His anger was usually directed at reminder letters from the school requesting him not to send his children barefoot to school.

  The teachers had an unpublished name for Thoma: the Spit Mill of Mannuthy. Conversation about him was enough to set peals of laughter ringing among the teachers. They doubled over with laughter when they discussed Thoma in their staff room.

  The school headmistress, Sreedevi, was a favored target of Thoma’s unruly outbursts. One day, Thoma was raging mad when said headmistress kicked out two of his sons from school for coming to class in torn shirts. He simply did not have money to afford essential things like clothing. He was forced to divert grocery money to meet the headmistress’s demand. He and his wife and children went hungry for the next couple of weeks, a supreme sacrifice to satisfy a trivial stipulation from a trivial woman, as per Thoma.

  He was hungry and angry.

  One certain day two weeks after the children’s humiliating dismissal, the headmistress was walking to school as usual in the early hours of the morning. She was dressed in a faded yellow cotton sari with gold borders. Her path to school took her through Thoma’s home front, which she considered a punishment she was awarded for her sins in the past life.

  Her sari on that particular day was the same color as a haystack. She looked like a walking haystack of the harvest season, parading along the road leading to Mannuthy School. At least, that is what a bullock pulling a cart lazing along the same road thought.

  Thoma was sitting barefoot on the floor at the edge of his front porch, smoking a beedi and dressed in a mundu and a torn white T-shirt. Subashini was in her cage hanging from the ceiling, right above him. They were both watching the traffic flow in front of the rental house. The crowd mostly consisted of the teachers and children heading to the morning classes.

  As soon as he spotted Sreedevi walking towards him maybe five houses away, Thoma tossed out the beedi he was smoking and got ready. He hurried to the front fence and threw a temper tantrum. He showered her with screaming spiced up with obscenities. His screaming, needless to stay, burst the tranquility of the countryside morning, making many a head turn toward him and the target of his agitation, Sreedevi.

  “How dare you walk along my road, you shirtless woman,” Thoma screamed at the headmistress. Thoma claimed the road running in front of his home as his own and considered the pedestrians that walked in front of him as trespassers. It was left to the imagination of the public to know why he called the teacher shirtless in a disparaging way. For one, a female did not wear shirt; only a male did and therefore there was nothing derogatory about a shirtless woman. Per opinion from the nearby toddy shop customers, Thoma assumed that he was insulting the teacher by giving tit for tat, since the teacher blamed his sons for not having proper shirt and Thoma, in return, was blaming the teacher for not having a shirt at all. Unknown to him, his comment ‘shirtless woman’ made many heads turn towards Sreedevi, some overwhelmed with consternation at the audacity of a woman to walk naked in the public and some others eager to see the unusual sight of a naked woman on a public road. However, the latter group was disappointed to see Sreedevi dressed properly in a sari and the former were relieved that a scandalous scene was avoided.

  Sreedevi had yet to walk past him to get to school. She raced as soon as she heard the insult showered on her, in order to get past him as soon as she could. As soon as she came close, Thoma spat. How she ran to get away from the rocketing spittle that came out of Thoma! Her sari flung violently over her shoulders in her hurry to get away from the angry man. The scene of her frantic race from Thoma was in sharp contrast to the peaceful, gentle breeze of the morning that was caressing the yellow trumpet flowers on the roadside.

  In her panic-ridden sprint, she unwittingly gravitated toward the bullock cart that previously passed by her and was across from Thoma’s home by now. The cart driver was singing a romantic Malayalam song to cheer up the sad bunch of school children heading to the school against their best wishes. The bullock on the right side of the cart eyed her hay-colored sari as an Onam feast of a haystack. The sumptuous meal of this fluttering haystack was more than what he could have bargained for, and he thanked his patron god, Lord Krishna, for delivering it right to his feet. He started munching on her sari merrily. The alert cart driver stopped the cart to let the headmistress gain distance from the dangerous bullock and get away, hopefully with her sari intact.

  The speeding headmistress was unaware of the bullock-breakfast episode taking shape on the rustic gravel road. The moment she felt that someone was tugging on her sari, she panicked, thinking Thoma got hold of her sari. She started running even faster without looking back, frightened as she was.

  The bullock was unaware of the broader drama being played out between the two-legged animals, Sreedevi and Thoma, and kept on munching on her sari, pulling her toward him in the process, blissfully unaware of what he was doing. Her sari being caught in the powerful jaw of the hungry bullock, sprinting Sreedevi started spinning like a spinning top, being ceremoniously stripped off her hay outfit by Lord Krishna’s four-legged friend.

  Only when she came face to face with the bullock after spinning some umpteen times did she realize what was happening. Her sari was in its mouth. Its no-nonsense style of voracious eating declared to the world that bullocks eat breakfast too, just like human beings. But then it was too late to alter the course of events. She had been stripped off her clothes.

  She was having a face-to-face encounter with a sari-eating bullock in her birthday suit. Her sari was trapped in the animal’s gyrating mouth. She was presented naked to an audience consisting of the break
fast eater, the cart driver, the left-side bullock, Subashini, and Thoma who got ready to deliver a second course of spit. The audience also included schoolchildren walking to school, who closed their eyes to avoid seeing the unmentionable.

  Sreedevi cut a helpless figure when the unexpected tide of events suddenly overwhelmed her. She was ashamed and trembling at the same time. She was screaming louder than the bellowing bullock. She wished she had not woken up that day, if only not to be drawn into the belittling theatrical developments that submerged her. The usually headstrong headmistress was reduced to a sorry figure of humiliation.

  She threw her books hard at the bullock, hoping to restrain him from his sari diet. But the animal would have nothing of it, determined as he was to keep on munching. He braved a shower of hardbound botany textbooks thrown by the teacher. He took blow after blow valiantly and continued his breakfast, refusing to get interrupted. He ate students’ homework thrown by Sreedevi.

  He and she were animals of the same hair, the bullock told himself, paraphrasing the expression “birds of the same feather,” while he was chomping on her sari, since he of the birthday suit found a kindred spirit in Sreedevi, who was attired in her birthday suit as well. The alert cart driver held on to the reins steadfastly to prevent his bullock from galloping to Sreedevi to have close encounter of a hanky-panky kind.

  Thoma, who was watching the unfolding drama and looking for an appropriate opening to intervene, decided to spit at this moment. And spit he did vociferously at Sreedevi.

  “Thoma spat,” chirped Subashini valiantly from her cage.

  The parrot had been watching the developments from the serenity of her cage and decided to make the announcement of an important development of the unfolding drama, Thoma’s spitting, which was going to change the course of events and probably the future of mankind, judging from the grave tone of the parrot’s public announcement.

  Thoma’s spit, with a determined mind of its own, split into two blobs at the end of its trajectory and decided to land on Sreedevi’s breasts. One blob landed on her left breast, and the other on her right breast. The spit never cared for screaming Sreedevi and launched itself onto where it always wanted to land, on her breasts. It had never thought that it would live to see a day when it could land on parts of female anatomy usually hidden from peering eyes by a ton of cotton sari.

  The spit blobs were hanging on to her bobbing boobs and were contemplating a soft landing on her more private parts down under, when the alert cart driver, who was enjoying the show so far, decided that it was time to put a stop to the criminal plot of the lecherous spit blobs. He jumped into action by jumping out of the cart to nip the scandalous act in the bud and to stop the infraction halfway in progress.

  He retrieved the sari from the hungry animal and offered it real hay instead, which he retrieved from the cart. He restrained the animal to prevent it from making further advances toward the helpless teacher, to whom he tossed her half-eaten sari.

  This charitable gesture from the bullock cart driver helped put a closure on the scandalous act that would have spiraled out of control. The news of the incident spread like wildfire in and around Mannuthy. The driver became a folk hero for saving the dignity of the headmistress.

  ***

  Ann was not supposed to be born. This secret was known only to her children and her husband, in addition to her parents. Her very existence was a miracle that defied all the known laws of probability. Her origin makes a fascinating story because of it springing out from highly improbable circumstances.

  Ann was known widely for her slowness, both in her mind and in her physical activity. “She is a slow-moving phenomenon,” Thoma told his siblings long ago, immediately after he tied the wedding thali around her neck at the altar of Saint Joseph’s Church. She would, however, pick up physical speed after her marriage, since she learned that it was an important factor for her survival. Speed helped her move out of the way of Thoma’s arm swings meant to beat the daylights out of her.

  Ann was made as a hybrid of a statue and a human. People in Amballore believed that God originally planned to create a statue, but changed his mind in the middle. He retained the statue part, and supplemented it with live features. The result was Ann. Her overall makeover was the aftermath of God’s afterthought. He flip-flopped.

  She had a cubical face—square shaped in the front, at both the sides, and at the bottom. Her geometry teacher used to say that she was created when God was taking geometry lessons. Curiosity got the better of God when he was in his geometry class, and he created a geometry-shaped face. The simplest shape he could think of as manifesting perfection was a cube formed when squares decide to circumscribe three-dimensional space. Even though he realized that the face he created was the pits in regard to aesthetical quality, he decided not to alter it; he decided to stick to his guns, determined as he was to create geometrical replica of a human face. This was how Ann got her geometry-figure face.

  She looked more like an aberration of three-dimensional space than someone who occupied it. When she talked or moved, it was like she set off distortions in the four-dimensional space-time continuum.

  Ann’s mother and father were born eons ago, toward the latter part of the nineteenth century. Born to a farming community and brought up as Catholics in the strictest terms of the religion, they were exemplary citizens. Sex was taboo in those times, and they claimed that they did not know how they created six children— though they knew very well how they did it but were afraid of acknowledging their role in the process, except in the confessional stand at their local church. Every time they initiated the nine-month process of giving birth to a new child, they went to the confessional stand to confess to the priest of the grave sin they committed. Immediately after Ann was conceived, both Varghese Mappila (her father) and Eliamma (her mother) went to the church and confessed.

  A sensationally unending stream of humongous blobs of semen spurted out of Varghese Mappila, whose ejaculation shook him and his bedroom like the Richter 9.5 earthquake that hit Chile in 1960. Eliamma screamed out so loudly that sleeping ducks in their farmyard woke up and went on a rampage of “quack, quack, quack” the whole night long, totally confused at the commotion that infiltrated their usually calm neighborhood.

  Varghese Mappila had planned to rear the ducks up until Easter and then butcher them to make Easter duck curry. Annoyed at their incessant quacking, he announced to Eliamma that he was going to kill them the very next day.

  “I will kill them tomorrow if only to get some sleep” he told Eliamma, little knowing that the earthquake-like tremor that he had triggered was the underlying cause of the nocturnal agitation.

  Eliamma was still in the throes of orgasm and hardly heard what her husband was saying, except the word “kill.”

  “Kill me tomorrow as you wish, oh Vargy (she called him Vargy only in the bedroom); do anything you want to do to me, but don’t stop what you are doing right now,” moaned Eliamma, still in the powerful grips of ecstasy.

  It was at that exhilarating moment of gripping intoxication that Eliamma felt that she was going to become pregnant, whether she was going to be killed by Varghese Mappila or not.

  Unseen and unknown to her, a drama was getting enacted in Eliamma’s uterus. Her peacefully waiting egg was greeted by a huge number of sperms estimated to be 750 million. The task confronting this massively large number of sperms was not trivial. To mate with Eliamma’s egg was the mission of each and every one of these sperms. For each sperm, to join Eliamma’s egg, to fertilize it, and to form a human being was indeed a dream come true. The odds of this happening were like winning the Kerala State lottery: very poor, one in 750 million.

  Each and every sperm knew about the unfavorable odds and naturally was very nervous. Competition was very high. The slowest-swimming sperm was found to be Ann’s. Every sperm in that big crowd knew in his or her heart that Ann was not going to make it.

  They sang in unison:

  Zero is the pro
bability for the slowest Ann

  To reach Eliamma’s egg, that is for sure.

  You or I might get close to the egg, God willing,

  But not Ann, not in this life, that’s for sure!

  Let her and members of this mating club know,

  This is a game of survival of the fittest!

  Their song reached a crescendo. All of them were dancing a mating dance simultaneously, trying to outrun each other at the same time, with the ultimate goal of reaching Eliamma’s egg. These dwarfs, 750 million in number, far more than the Indian population at that time, far too small (micrometers in size) to be seen by the naked eye, transformed the uterus into an orchestra hall, filling it with their enchanting symphony.

  Each sperm was wearing a tiny white T-shirt. Inscribed on the T-shirt was either X or Y. The X represented the X chromosome that particular sperm was carrying, which would result in a female baby upon successful fertilization. Y, on the other hand, represented a Y chromosome, which would result in a baby boy upon successfully merging with Eliamma’s waiting egg.

  It is not that Ann was totally isolated in the swarm of Varghese Mappila’s sperms. The females in the group, carrying X chromosomes, were sympathetic to Ann and tried to cheer her up to speed her along in the process. “Come on, Ann! Move fast, you girl; you can do it, you can,” they shouted encouragingly to Ann, trying to pull her along with them. The opposing male team of Y chromosome carriers was contemptuous to Ann, and they ridiculed the X chromosome carriers for creating a scene and detouring from the principal task of accomplishing fertilization.

  Far, far away from earth, in the land of heaven, God was watching this incredibly fascinating yet alarming development with amusement and meticulous attention. He lit up a cigarette; sipped on a cup of coffee, and turned off the TV he was watching. He then pulled the window curtain and looked outside and saw his neighbor forgot to empty the trash. While cursing him along with the greenhouse effect and ozone layer depletion, he started watching the terrestrial melodrama. The developments were alarming enough to call for his attention.